China 2026

The route

Travel essentials

The whole trip took three weeks, July and August 2026. That means peak summer heat and Chinese school holiday season, so locals travel a lot inside their own country, even though it’s not yet a heavily touristic destination for foreigners. I went with my brother, not solo. Plan for continental distances: getting between cities is closer to crossing Europe than crossing a country, so domestic travel time needs real space in the itinerary. Generally you don’t have to be afraid visiting China (especially as a woman too), it’s one of the safest countries in the world and a safer place then Europe on average.

Visa. As an Austrian you don’t need one. China currently has a visa-free policy for up to 30 days for a bunch of European passports, Austria included. Worth double-checking it’s still active before you book, since these policies get renewed and adjusted on short notice.

Mobile internet and the firewall. The prep that actually mattered was mobile internet, a VPN, Chinese payment apps, and translation, since you won’t get by on English and most people you meet won’t speak or understand any. Do all of this before you land, especially the mobile internet, because I can’t imagine trying to sort it out once you’re already in the country. The reason is the Great Firewall, arguably more impressive than the actual Great Wall. It blocks the usual suspects like Instagram, Google, and Google Maps. Apple Maps, though, works fine and is allowed. Don’t let this scare you off. China wants tourists, so in practice it’s less strict than it sounds, and as long as you’re not doing anything actually illegal, a VPN or the right mobile data routing gets you to WhatsApp and Instagram without drama.

We bought eSIM plans from Airalo. They work, if a bit slow, and complaining in their in-app chatbot support seems to help, for what it’s worth. These plans route through Hong Kong or Taiwan, which sidesteps the Great Firewall entirely. Sounds odd, but again, they want your tourist money, so the workaround is basically sanctioned.

Payments. Link your debit or credit card to Alipay (I used this one exclusively) and make sure WeChat Pay accepts foreign cards too. I ran into hiccups here and had to call my European bank in the first few days, which was annoying and entirely avoidable if you set it up before you fly.

Apps and getting around. Alipay and WeChat are what’s called “super apps,” a concept that barely exists in the West. Inside one app you get a whole ecosystem of smaller apps, all interconnected. For hotels and trains we used Trip.com, which worked seamlessly throughout. For getting around, apart from subways, we relied heavily on Didi, China’s answer to Uber, with unmatched availability, low prices, and the option to book a private car for distances up to 200km for surprisingly little money. One catch was that I couldn’t use Didi’s mini-app inside Alipay and had to install the standalone Didi app instead. This happens with a few services whose full version is tied to a Chinese passport or ID and built primarily for locals, so foreigners sometimes get bounced to the separate app.

Personal thoughts, experiences and research

Regarding Chinese culture, I could probably write a whole book. What I was really curious about was how people actually live: what locals think about their government, how that compares to the West, how much they actually know, whether that knowledge is biased, and how much censorship shapes it. And the bigger question: can they keep driving economic progress forward the way they have for the last 70 years?

What struck me most, since this was my first time in Asia, was that it felt like landing on another planet. A different language and a different script, a different payment system, people looking and behaving quite differently. It drove home something obvious but easy to forget: there are around 8.3 billion people on this planet, and “the West” makes up roughly 1 billion of them. We should probably pay a lot more attention to Asia, China, Japan, India, and the rest. China alone is roughly the size of the US or of Europe, with two to three times either one’s population, all under a single government. That’s an enormous workforce, but it also means they must be doing something right to keep a population that size pulling in one direction. I honestly can’t imagine that happening in Europe.

How people live

The first things you notice are the surface ones. People spit, fart, and burp (“rülpsen,” as we’d say in German) fairly openly, so don’t be surprised. Their cuisine, on the other hand, wasn’t really something I enjoyed. For one, people tend to eat the same kind of food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, usually very spicy, and heavy on meat. And from each animal they eat everything, a habit that comes straight out of their recent history of poverty, when nothing from a farm animal could go to waste. What I can genuinely recommend as an experience: hot pot in Chongqing, and dim sum in any coastal city like Guangzhou or Shenzhen.

That poverty is more recent than it looks from the outside. Eighty years ago the country was destitute, and what they’ve achieved on average, across the entire mass of their population, has been dramatic over just the last couple of decades. Cities now look like people live almost as they do in the West, if not more advanced. With that history in mind, though, they still seem to care less about any single individual life than Europeans typically do. That may sound harsh, but it’s a pattern you see in most countries that have come out of severe, recent poverty.

The same history shows up in how people treat their own time. Work comes first, and free time or leisure for its own sake doesn’t get much thought. We met one Didi driver who runs his own small company and drives on weekends too. He works all day, every day. For him, the extra money for his family clearly outweighs the value of time spent on himself.

Do they simply work harder?

That driver is the anecdote version of a thesis I went in wanting to test: that China is catching up simply because people there work harder. The hours back it up. A Chinese worker puts in something like 2,000 to 2,100 hours a year, against roughly 1,800 in the US and 1,450 in Austria. So the raw effort is real.

But hours are only half the equation. The other half is how much value gets produced in each of those hours, and there the picture inverts completely. Measured per hour worked, China produces roughly a fifth of what the US or Austria does. Austria works the fewest hours of the three and still out-produces China per hour by about five times. This is where the popular version of the story goes wrong: it conflates two different claims. More people working more hours does produce a bigger economy in total, and China’s total output is genuinely enormous. But that is a function of having 1.4 billion people, not of any individual Chinese worker outperforming an Austrian one. Being big and being efficient are different achievements, and only the first one is explained by working harder. The famous 996 culture (9am to 9pm, six days a week) is, if anything, evidence for the same point rather than against it: compensating for low output per hour by adding more hours is exactly what a low-productivity economy looks like, not a high-productivity one.

The obvious next explanation is that China is just doing ordinary catch-up growth, the same thing postwar Germany and Japan did, where a poor country grows fast simply because there is so much easy ground to make up. That is part of it, but it is too clean, because it doesn’t account for the fact that in a handful of specific sectors China isn’t catching up at all. It’s already ahead. EVs, batteries, smartphones, and drones are not areas where China is closing a gap; they are areas where everyone else is.

What resolves the contradiction is that China isn’t one economy, it’s two stacked on top of each other. Somewhere between 300 and 400 million people are still in agriculture, informal services, or migrant work made precarious by the hukou system, which ties your access to schooling, healthcare, and housing to where you were registered at birth rather than where you actually live and work. That mass is what drags the national average down to a fifth of Austria’s. Sitting right next to it are companies like BYD, CATL, DJI, and Huawei, which are as productive as anything in the world in their particular niches. Both facts are true at once, which is why any single number about “China” tends to mislead.

As for why those specific sectors run so far ahead, a few things seem to compound. They leapfrogged rather than transitioned, with no legacy combustion-engine investment to defend, which is precisely the sunk cost the German car industry is currently drowning in. The Pearl River Delta supply chain is dense enough that a hardware prototype cycle takes days instead of months, which is a physical advantage no amount of capital elsewhere can replicate quickly. Firms like BYD vertically integrate all the way down to their own batteries and chips, capturing margin at every layer. The real labor advantage isn’t cheap workers but cheap engineers, available in volume. The domestic market functions as a brutal filter, with something like 100 EV brands grinding against each other before the survivors are exported. And the state absorbs the risk of the capital-intensive early phase through subsidies and cheap credit, so companies can lose money for years without dying.

Hong Kong, Macau, and the Taiwan question

We also visited Hong Kong and Macau. Both are what’s called Special Administrative Regions, or SARs: former colonies that remain culturally and politically distinct from the mainland. For example, you can buy books in Hong Kong that would get you arrested for possessing on the mainland.

I was also curious how Taiwan compares to these two, though it’s a fundamentally different case. Taiwan is not an SAR and never has been. It’s self-governing in practice, officially the Republic of China, with its own constitution, its own democratically elected president, its own military, and its own legal system. Beijing claims Taiwan as its 23rd province but has no actual control over the island. China originally floated “one country, two systems,” the same model used for Hong Kong and Macau, as a possible path to eventual unification with Taiwan. Taiwan rejects that outright, and public opinion there has only hardened against it after watching Beijing erode the autonomy it once promised Hong Kong.